Georgina Sparks was not Gossip Girl, but she might as well have been.
The character, a socialite who trafficked in wild manipulation, convoluted scheming and plenty of narcotics, was a main antagonist of the 2000s teen drama series that aired on the CW network, an inveterate plotter in a statement necklace. (“Gossip Girl” is available to stream on Max, Netflix and Tubi.) A former queen bee turned problem child who refused to be banished to boarding school in Switzerland, she had the Upper East Side wrapped around her manicured finger.
Georgina was played by the actress Michelle Trachtenberg, who was found dead at 39 in her Manhattan apartment on Wednesday. Her performance as the teenage supervillain brought an arch flair to a character who was only a minor figure in the novels that were the basis for the show, but became a fan favorite onscreen.
As an actress, Trachtenberg was not a queen of mean — or at least not only that. She started performing as a child, and audiences watched her grow into the different modes of young womanhood throughout the ’90s and 2000s.
In her title role in the 1996 children’s movie “Harriet the Spy,” she was clever, opinionated and driven in a way girls didn’t often get to be onscreen. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the influential horror-dramedy, she was introduced mid-series as Buffy’s bubbly yet stubborn younger sister, Dawn, balancing supernatural forces with heartfelt teenage emotion.
In the 2005 sports comedy-drama “Ice Princess,” she played a geeky teenager who dreamed of becoming a professional figure skater. I remember watching “Ice Princess” on the Disney Channel as a child, drawn in by Trachtenberg’s likability: She was beautiful, brainy and talented, unapologetic about her skills but never arrogant.
Georgina had the same intelligence, but the character was the most memorable of Trachtenberg’s career because she revealed new layers of the actress’s talent. Georgina was an evolution from the plucky girls Trachtenberg had played before; her confidence commanded every room she sauntered into. She was a smoky-eyed revenant ready to burn down a high society she felt spurned her.
Georgina made the tawdry lives of the student body at Constance Billard-St. Jude’s School and later New York University, when the cast went to college, exponentially tawdrier: She blackmailed a friend with a surreptitious sex tape. She seduced that same friend’s boyfriend. She outed someone as gay, planted drugs and adopted fake identities.
Her actions were objectively awful. But Trachtenberg made it look like Georgina was having more fun than anyone else in Manhattan. She accentuated Georgina’s machinations with eyebrow raises and eye rolls, a taunting nemesis who played with her food as she tormented her classmates. Her voice contained multitudes — sweet softness, barbed taunts, an ego-shattering deadpan. She smiled as she cornered her quarry, a pageant grin Trachtenberg loaded with malicious glee.
In one scene, Georgina threatens to resurrect a dark secret about Serena van der Woodsen, the effortlessly cool It Girl played by Blake Lively. “I’m not afraid of you anymore,” Serena says.
“Oh?” Georgina replies, sporting a bratty pout before smirking into the phone. “You should be.”
In another, Georgina dramatically abandons a brief stint as a born-again Christian, informing a rival: “You can tell Jesus that the bitch is back.” (An audio clip of the line became popular on TikTok.)
Georgina could have been too much, even in a constantly absurd show that had high schoolers entering high-stakes poker games and owning a burlesque club. But Trachtenberg made Georgina a charismatic scene-stealer with her magnetic cruelty. Her cutting remarks cleaved through the polite air of luxury apartments and ivy-covered campuses.
Georgina softens somewhat over time, becoming a mother and using her ill-gotten skill set to work as a book agent for Penn Badgley’s writer character, Dan Humphrey. Even then, Trachtenberg let the character’s jagged edges cut through plush society. (When Georgina appears in the sequel series, the mother to a 10-year-old son, she blackmails the new Gossip Girl.)
In one scene at a party in the fourth season of “Gossip Girl,” Georgina becomes tired of polite chatter, and Trachtenberg sounds like a Dorothy Parker for the Myspace generation.
“Now, if you‘ll excuse me,” Georgina says with a smile that drops as she reaches for a glass of wine, “I’m going to get drunk enough to make you all seem interesting.”
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